No Further Questions

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Even though there is both a house on your left and your right. At equal distance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘One hundred per cent.’

  ‘Well, I can’t be one hundred per cent because I didn’t see her, but—’

  ‘Yes,’ Harriet says, cutting her off. ‘So, it might easily have been other neighbours. Somebody outside. It’s a city. People must walk by all the time – do they?’

  Theresa says nothing, looking confused. ‘Do people walk by all the time?’ Harriet says again.

  ‘Often, yes. They do.’

  ‘Is it fair to say that you know the defendant better than your other neighbours?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Theresa says. ‘A lot better. I would know her—’

  Theresa walks right into the trap.

  Harriet opens her mouth to speak. ‘And so you’re more likely, aren’t you, to assume that the voice you’re hearing is that of the person you know best? When really it could have been anybody … a stranger. Another neighbour. A neighbour’s friend?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Theresa says, battered on the witness stand.

  How clever they are, I find myself thinking, these lawyers. How they can take something that is virtually certain, and turn it inside out, so it becomes unformed and unsure of itself. Turning a truth into a mess; into lies and falsehoods and incorrect memories. A beam of pure white light, refracted into a complicated rainbow.

  I am certain Theresa did hear Becky, painful as it is for me to admit it. They are her speech patterns, peppered with her swear words. She sounds just like that when she is … when she is angry.

  ‘Did the anonymous shout sound – how did it sound to you?’

  ‘Angry.’

  ‘In its words or its tone?’

  Theresa looks up at the lights, which makes me look, too; strip lights, garish ones. She takes a while before answering. ‘Both,’ she says.

  ‘So then,’ Harriet says, ‘I’m afraid I have to ask … you knew the defendant had a babysitting arrangement with the mother of Layla?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you were struck by the menace in her voice – if, indeed, it was even her – which was, conceivably, directed at the baby.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And yet, what did you do? You did nothing.’

  ‘No,’ Theresa says softly.

  ‘So I’m inclined to wonder, Ms Williams, whether you really were as worried as you say. Perhaps, really, you thought this was quite usual. A woman, frustrated at bedtime by her child. We have all been there, have we not? Perhaps, now, with hindsight, you remember it differently. Incorrectly.’

  I study Theresa. She isn’t looking at Harriet. Instead, she is looking down at her hands, which rest on the wood of the witness stand.

  ‘Maybe,’ Theresa says. ‘Yes.’

  I look down at my hands, folded neatly in my lap. Half-moon-shaped dents are at the centre of my palms. Shouting at bedtime. I have been there. I certainly have. I can’t bring myself to look up at Becky, or across at Scott. They have both seen the worst of me. I know Becky will be looking at me, wondering if I have done as she did. Of course I’ve felt angry. Of course I’ve shouted.

  What I once said to Scott keeps returning to my mind. It was two and a half weeks after Layla was born.

  Labour had been … God. Like something else entirely. Almost medieval. I remember every moment of it. There is actually a place where you can go where pain is unbelievable. And everybody is casual about it, and will leave you in that state for hours, will tell you to pull yourself together and push, after thirty hours of it. There are laws about hurting people’s feelings in the workplace, but there are no laws about this, this brute force, forceps, a cold hand, reaching unexpectedly and urgently right up inside me.

  After nineteen hours of contractions, I was one centimetre dilated. I went in, but they sent me away again. At home, I could only sit in one position: on the floor, with my left leg cocked on the bed. After labour I had hip pain for almost as long as the bleeding lasted.

  The contractions came and then they went but they would surely come again, and perhaps they would never end, I thought, as I stared at the wall. The problem was I had been ambivalent. So on the fence that I could have teetered either way. My only evidence for going forth and procreating had been that most people seemed to rather enjoy it – in a kind of grim in the trenches way, admittedly – and that most people had more than one child. Never mind that I lacked the urge and the hormones and, seemingly, the inner grit. Never mind all that.

  After thirty hours, she was born, by forceps, and at that moment, with the metal inside me, I no longer cared. Cut me open, I thought. Kill me.

  They handed her to me, but I don’t remember it. After an hour, a nurse took me to the toilet to wee and brush my teeth. She combed my hair for me. While I was in there, they got a cleaner to come in and mop the floor. They mopped the blood away, the water turning burgundy in the bucket that I saw as I emerged from the toilet.

  Ten o’clock at night came, and Scott had to leave. (‘Visiting hours are over,’ a bewildered-looking nurse said to me.) And there I was, alone in the hospital bed, with my daughter – my daughter! – to my right. And the decision – that tiny decision, it seemed to me – to ditch the pill and to tip ever so slowly on to the other side of the fence and drift slowly downwards loomed so large it almost seemed to sit inside the room with me.

  It got easier, of course. The disorientation faded. Once I got home and I’d had a bath and a cup of coffee, it was alright. But what helped bring me back from the medieval world, as I called it, was seeing Becky, who said, ‘I didn’t want to have to tell you about the labour bit – but Jesus!’ Classic Becky. ‘You’re doing alright, though, here?’ she said, as though she knew. Here. The new world I inhabited. It was different. I was for ever changed. And I was glad she was there with me. Here.

  And then the love came. Like my milk, it took a few days, but it arrived, as though somebody had taken my soul and replaced it with something much bigger, much more inclusive.

  Scott had taken two weeks off work, and we spent them sequestered away together. Days blended into nights. He made sure he was awake every minute that I was. I protested, but I loved the company. Somebody to hand Layla to while I made toast for the two of us. Somebody who got it, whose bones ached, too, with tiredness. After a week or so, we were both – remarkably – in bed, Layla asleep in her Moses basket across the room, and he pulled me towards him. It had been like returning home after a long stint away. Here we were: on the other side of it.

  Scott went back to work, though, and by then the love for Layla was no longer new. The novelty of changing nappies had worn off, too. I was in the en suite, sitting on the floor. I don’t know why I was in there. I was in a rare petulant mood where I wanted to demonstrate how unhappy I was, and how shocked I was, and how I didn’t realize it could be this way. I chose to do so by sitting on the bathroom floor, five minutes before Scott was due home.

  He arrived, shirt sleeves rolled up, and there I was with Layla. Screaming Layla.

  The floor of the en suite was dusty and I think it was making Layla snuffle and sneeze. She had been crying for over two hours.

  ‘She’s been like this all day,’ I said.

  Scott made a funny kind of gesture. A sort of what can you do? Meant well, of course, but I didn’t take it that way.

  ‘I wish we’d never had her,’ I said spitefully.

  Scott didn’t react. He stopped looking at me, looking instead down at the sink. He wiped away a smidgen of yet more dirt, then inspected it on the end of his finger. He was trying to distract himself. ‘Give her to me,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t wish we hadn’t had a baby,’ I said.

  ‘Right?’ he said.

  ‘I wish we hadn’t had her,’ I said. ‘Layla.’ It came from a nasty, hollow place inside of me. It was a statement meant to hurt him. To worry him. So that he would help me more. After that blissf
ul paternity leave, his career had returned to how it had always been – as if he’d merely gone to Italy for two weeks, not changed his life for ever – while mine floundered, calls from assistants unanswered for days as I ran on the treadmill of feeding, changing, settling Layla to sleep. Over and over. When one finished, the next began.

  He took a step back. His eyebrows drew together in surprise. ‘What?’ he said, though I’m sure he didn’t want me to say it again.

  ‘I can’t think of a worse baby to have,’ I said. I stood up and handed her to him. Even as I did so, my arms missed the weight of her: the paradox of motherhood.

  He never mentioned it again, and neither did I. But sometimes, in the dark days that followed her death and Becky’s arrest, I wonder what he really thought, then, and what he thinks now, too. Motherhood was such a tangled knot, and I had only just begun unpicking it. Most people had years to unspool it, to inspect it. To come to terms with life changing for the worst, and the better, all at once. To understand that life was much harder, but strangely more fulfilling, because I had split my life in two – into mine and Layla’s.

  But we didn’t have time.

  ‘Thank you, Ms Williams,’ Harriet says. She sits down.

  A strand of my hair drifts down and lands on my arm.

  Ellen stands up to re-examine.

  ‘In your opinion,’ she says, darting a glance at the defence lawyer she was laughing with just hours previously, ‘how did the shouting sound?’

  ‘Like somebody very angry. At the end of her tether.’

  ‘Frightening?’

  ‘Yes, certainly,’ Theresa says. ‘Especially for a child.’

  ‘Witness can’t possibly know—’ Harriet starts to say.

  ‘I can’t control her answers,’ Ellen says to Harriet. ‘Nothing further,’ she adds.

  As she sits down, I catch a tiny smile on her face. It’s a good day at the office, for her.

  24

  Becky

  Afternoon, Wednesday 25 October

  I am in Sainsbury’s and had forgotten how difficult everything can be with a baby. Xander never cried quite like this. The health visitor called his sleep abnormal, but Marc and I didn’t care.

  ‘Our baby sleeps too much!’ Marc said to me one night while we were lying together on our cheap IKEA bed, Xander asleep in the Moses basket just a few feet away.

  We spent hours in that room, in those early days. We used to eat dinner in bed. We weren’t tired, and Xander would have tolerated sleeping downstairs with us and being carried up when we went to bed. We just enjoyed being lazy in there, together, watching television on the old TV set and eating.

  ‘Can you imagine what a doctor would think about that for a complaint? Please help us; we’re fully rested!’

  ‘Besides, he’s pretty fat,’ I said, sitting up slightly on the bed and leaning over to look at Xander. The rings of fat around his wrists and ankles. It was warm in the bedroom, and he was naked save for a nappy.

  The memories are bittersweet, these days. ‘Don’t worry,’ a friend once said to me when I mentioned Marc’s name one too many times on a night out. ‘Everyone has an ex they’re still in love with.’

  I had blinked, and denied it. And yet, later that night, in bed, I thought: Of course. Of course I am. But it’s too late for us, anyway, now.

  Is it?

  The quiet question rises up inside me. But it is. I am incapable. I am incapable of telling Martha how hard the nannying is, and I am incapable of telling Marc how sorry I am about what happened between us. What a fuck-up I am. Martha knows how to apologize. And Martha can cope with Layla. What’s the point of me? God, I want a glass of wine as big as my head, now. I’ll buy a fucking bottle.

  Layla has cried in the ready meal aisle of Sainsbury’s, and through all of the fruit and veg. As I reach to grab a bottle of milk in the dairy aisle, Marc texts me, just a photograph of a beautifully laid carpet.

  Lovely! I reply, gritting my teeth while Layla cries as I adjust her in order to respond.

  You okay? he replies immediately. It’s true it’s unlike me to send such a short, dismissive reply.

  In baby hell, I send back. Lovely carpet though, really, I add.

  I love how a carpet can transform a room. I know I would’ve been an excellent designer; I could always select the exact right colour. There’s a huge difference between oatmeal and fawn, trust me.

  When I started set-dressing, and back when Marc was still my husband, I would gather up my materials and go with him on his carpet-fitting days. I would sit in the room next door to the one he was fitting in, spread out my cardboard and sequins and Sellotape, and we’d chat, and he would swear at the carpet stretcher, and his bad knee. We’d play games – listing celebrities beginning with every letter of the alphabet, or playing I Spy – and he’d make me proud of him with how fastidious he was, how neat. I loved to watch the transformation take place, from bare floor to fluffy carpet. I loved the smell of it. Marc later told me it was caused by something called 4-phenylcyclohexene, which rather took the romance out of it. ‘No, it smells of newness and hope,’ I replied, and he threw his head back with laughter.

  You need to tell her no, next time, Marc types back now as I stand in the supermarket. Takes the piss.

  Doesn’t it just, I reply, but say nothing further.

  What else is there to say? The last thing I want is Marc getting protective, intervening, trying to fix it, as is his way.

  I buy only the necessities, now, alone: milk, a reduced baguette, some hummus. I have four bottles left of Martha’s milk, so Layla will be okay. I need to get home and tidy: I cringe as I think of the house waiting for me. I have always had a tendency to let things get sinful before I tidy, enjoying the dramatic transformation even a bit of housework brings about. I’m looking forward to removing the soiled dishes piled high on the kitchen window sill just as soon as Layla gives me a moment.

  My phone rings in the car and I answer it on hands free. Marc’s deep voice booms through the in-car system. ‘I can already hear her,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t, Marc,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Don’t … it’s fine. Just don’t.’

  ‘They’re taking advantage of you,’ he says.

  ‘They’re not. They’re really not. I volunteered. It’s only tonight. One night.’

  ‘But it’s all the time, Sam,’ he says.

  I shrug in the car as I wait at a set of traffic lights, even though he can’t see me. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I know. I know it is.’

  ‘Why is she crying so much, anyway?’ he says. ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘She’s a baby,’ I say. We hang up soon after that. God, I don’t need him to tell me they’re taking advantage of me. It makes it worse, not better.

  We are hot when we get home, and Layla is bright red and screaming as I open the car door. It won’t open fully, and closes back on to my hip, and I clench my jaw. ‘Please be quiet,’ I say, taking a moment to lean against the side and try to breathe. ‘Please, please just be quiet.’

  As I scoop Layla up, I see her. My neighbour, Theresa. She’s in yoga wear. A vest top and a long-line cardigan. Leggings. Ugg boots. No doubt about it: she has been eating avocados and meditating. Straight out of a fucking romcom.

  She lifts her arm in a wave. The smile dies as she sees Layla’s bright-red screaming face.

  Theresa once complained about one of the other neighbours, Sheila, who liked to cook and listen to reggae every Saturday afternoon. I liked to hear the reggae drifting through the walls, and smell the spices and the jerk chicken. Sometimes Sheila brought leftovers round on paper plates covered in foil, and I liked that, too – like party food. She had stopped bringing Theresa leftovers, she told me, after the complaint. And she had turned her music down, too, so on Saturdays I had to strain to hear it.

  ‘My sister’s baby,’ I say, swinging Layla’s car seat. It’s weightier than I remember with Xander. How did I carry t
his stuff around all the time? I must have had absolute guns for biceps, like Michelle Obama, or something.

  ‘Oh, is she struggling? Your sister?’ Theresa says.

  ‘No, no. Not really,’ I say. ‘Her job is … I’m stepping in. Sorry for any crying,’ I say with a grimace. ‘She’s not very settled. At times.’

  ‘Why are you … that’s so generous,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah, well. She couldn’t find a nanny who she could just call up. You know?’

  She lifts her chin and looks at me squarely. She has moaned, in the past, about me, too. About Xander and his footballs. She doesn’t much like children, is my guess, and she doesn’t want there to be a baby next door. She is one of those people who sees kids, somehow, not as volatile little humans with fat hands and short legs and tempers, but as another species entirely. ‘Give him a bloody break,’ I have wanted to say, over and over, when she texts me: Another ball in our garden. Always full stops at the end of her sentences.

  Layla has been crying for the entire conversation.

  ‘You see?’ I say with a laugh as we turn to go in, holding tightly on to the car seat, even though it is making my arm tremble. Oh well, I think bitterly. Martha’s life may be perfect, but her baby sure isn’t.

  ‘She’s very noisy,’ Theresa says. ‘Has she been fed?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, testily. Does everybody – every single person – insist on treating me like a piece of shit? Like a child? A rubbish employee who needs micromanaging? I clench my jaw in rage.

  As I turn to leave, I see Theresa’s eyes taking in the plates in the kitchen window, piled so high it looks as if they may fall at any moment.

  25

  Martha

  Scott puts the television on, low, when we get in. We both behave in this way. Taking up as little space as possible. We hardly make any noise. It is as if we have spent most of our happiness. The dregs are being meted out, and they have to last a lifetime. That’s grief, I guess.

  I drum my fingers against my leg as I try to think about it. I consult the lists I made the previous night, holding the pages close so that Scott can’t see. Timelines, but nothing more. What am I doing? I rise and go into the bedroom. Scott says nothing.